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House Update: The Floor Plan

Yay! I'm so excited to share our floor plan with you guys. It's been such a fun part of the home building process to deign a home that fits our lifestyle and personal needs. Like I said before, our home is pretty modest in terms of new builds in our area. Josh and I were talking about how excessive homes have become. While we were driving around Salt Lake last week we drove by the old charming homes around downtown and talked about how different it would be to raise a family in a 800 sq. ft. home and then you get to our city and each home has around 1,000 sq. ft per person living in the home. So much space! Something Josh and I loved and hated about our old home was the space. We always talked about how it would be the perfect home if the living room square footage was put into the family room. That home was a little over 1,000 sq. feet total. But we loved it! We were close and the tight living space was actually really nice. It was just the family room that was extremely small, especially when we'd have guests over.

Our new home is a little over 2,000 square feet of finished living area with an additional 2,000 square feet of unfinished basement that will be used for storage. The thing we love most though, is the lot. The half acre of land that has endless possibilities (Josh and I already are thinking of the landscaping we want to do over the next two years. I'm thinking pool, he's thinking basketball court ;) ) but I'll save that for another post.

So let's get into the floor plan.
It's not the best quality. I'm trying to figure out how to make it more clear.

The first thing we knew we did not want was a living room. We never used ours in the old house so that was out the window. We instead made the family room, kitchen and dining one big area. We also moved the staircase to the basement into the entryway to open the area up a bit more.

The entryway and family room as well as the master bedroom all have vaulted ceilings which we are pretty excited for. I'm have dreams of wooden beams and ship lap ceilings.

Something we weren't sure on and made a last minute change to was the double french doors off the back of the house. We initially had a single door going out to the porch and after talking with the architect and our builder we decided to go for he double french doors with transoms. I think it will look amazing and will help open the area up a ton during the summer. Plus our view of the mountain is something we don't want to hide.

The kitchen ceilings will be 9' to be able to have the kitchen cabinets go up to the ceiling and we also decided to make the island a little larger to make room for a double farmhouse sink.

One more thing we knew we wanted from the beginning is a window in every room. This made tweaking the plan a little harder because a window in the laundry room was a must. Our architect was amazing though so he was able to get everything just so to be able to optimize as much natural light as possible.

Everything else in the floor plan seems pretty self explanatory. We are getting so anxious as the process continues and I can't wait to start talking about the design aspects of it all! Tile, flooring, sinks, vanities, railings, furniture, decor, I just can't wait!

Oh and I know I keep saying I'll talk more about the process and numbers so here is a bit of whats been going on with that. When we closed on our lot we had to pay $55,000 towards the loan as a down payment. When we close on the house and the construction loan and lot loan are merged into one mortgage, we will put down the remaining $30,000. That will be our 20% down give or take depending on what the actual price of the house comes back as when we go to close.

Also, one of the reasons why we started so late on the house was because we found out that we might have to bring in better soil to make a better starting ground for the foundation. The bank had to rewrite our loan putting in an additional 10,000 dollars! Josh and I were pretty bummed about that but what do you do? Once we broke ground, the geo-tech came out to do an analysis on the soil. We got the reports back this week and they came back perfect!!! So now that $10,000 can either be used for upgrades in the house or not used at all and be taken off the loan (and off our mortgage) come closing time!

Do you guys have any specific questions you'd like me to answer regarding the home build or anything I've talked about so far? I'm trying to remember everything that's been happening so far ha.